6Binary Studio

Pizza Hut

Mobile Application

Pizza Hut is an American multinational restaurant chain and international franchise founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas by Dan and Frank Carney. They serve their signature pan pizza and other dishes including pasta, breadsticks and desserts. The chain has 17,639 restaurants worldwide as of 2020,[6]making it the world's largest pizza chain by number of locations. It is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc., one of the world's largest restaurant companies.

This project involved creating a mobile application to serve the META region that was on brand with the current brand language of Pizza Hut, and had a quick and user friendly journey for the end user.

AreaProduct Design
MediumDigital
Tools6B, paper, Mural, Figma

About Project

What was it all about?

Pizza Hut in the Middle East region were looking to facilitate user-friendly, quick and easy ordering for their customers in the form of a mobile application. The ultimate business goal here was to increase existing return customers, as well as provide an ordering experience such that the order frequency and quantity increased.

Project Team

1 Delivery Manager, 1 Product Manager, 1 UX/Visual Designer, 2 Visual Designer, 1 Front-End Developer, 5 Back-end Developers, 2 QA Engineers.

My Role

I was brought into this project to create the Design strategy for the RFP to be presented to Pizza Hut. I pitched and represented Design for the RFP presentation.

Design Strategist :: Conducted user, product, and market research (all specific to the Middle East region). Established the current journeys of the personas today and the challenges and opportunities. Followed by big ideas that would act as differentiators for Pizza Hut and thus bring them closer to their project goal.
Lead UX Designer :: Complete user experience design of the product from ideation to completion.
Visual designer :: Using Pizza Hut's FCDS Design Language as a starting point, designed the landing, ordering and checkout experience for the pitch and later the end-to-end experience for the actual implementation.

Design Process

How did we go about the project?

Initially for the RFP, we used the Design Thinking framework, and

Conducted user, product, and market research (all specific to the Middle East region)
Established the current journeys of the personas today
Identified the challenges and opportunities
Followed by big ideas that would act as differentiators for Pizza Hut and thus bring them closer to their project goal

Later, once the RFP was successfully awarded to the team, we based the foundation of the project on, - user centric design - working with multi disciplinary teams - towards a scalable plan that aimed at continuous delivery

Business Need

What are we trying to achieve for the Business?

The RFP defined the business need of the project, based on market and other pertinent research, as the need to create a mobile application to serve the META region that was on brand with the current brand language of Pizza Hut. It needed to be quick and user friendly for the end user such that they were keen to order often. Some of the business needs included:

Easier and effective user experience.
Improved conversion rates.
Increased relevance to customers.
Modern solutions that offer delightful experiences.

User Research

Who are all the personas of this narrative?

Since this was an RFP and there was no access to existing user research or customers, I was lucky enough to know a few friends in the Middle East region as well conduct secondary research to understand and develop personas based off all of this information.

Gayatri | Expat working mom

Faisal | Working family head

Kelly | Expat working single

Mohammed | College student

As-Is Journey

What's the journey and challenges of the users today?

Mapping out the current workflow of the different personas was next. I put together a narrative based on all the research we had so far and this helped identify the painpoints, gaps and opportunities within the current workflow for the user.

Mohammed's As-Is: Illustrating his journey as it is today, identifying pain points and opportunities

The Making

Explorations and Wires

Sketching out ideas and directions this could be taken in was next on the list. It was really exciting and rewarding to come up with some cool directions we could take the app in considering we use food apps very often in our daily lives. Starting with hand drawn sketches helped me fail fast and move faster, getting a multitude of ideas out at speed.

As we guerilla tested these in the form of paper prototypes with users, we were able to establish a direction and then I started hi-fidelity wires and interactive prototypes.

Visual Design

Staying true to the Pizza Hut Design guidelines, there was still scope for experimentation with the look and feel. Food photographs that were much more appealing to the eye were used that helped focus on the product as well create an immediate desire to order. Illustrative elements were peppered through the experience to make it more appealing to the eye and add an element of fun. Taking on board feedback from the Pizza Hut team post securing the RFP, I introduced more of their symbolic red into the interface.

Sneak peek of the ordering experience

Coupons introduced as part of the experience specifically for Oman

Some mockups for 'marketing moments' that could be used strategically within the app

The splash animation as a moment of welcome to the 'hut' 🍕❤️

The Impact

What did users say?

The Pizza Hut Oman app was released on the Google Play Store in July 2021. 10k+ downloads have been recorded as of March, 2022. One of the sources of user feedback specifically around the user experience is the Play Store and includes comments like "Easy to navigate, easy to order ⭐⭐", "Very simple and fast to order", "This app is very simple and helpful", "Easy to use", "Super user friendly"!

What is the impact to the business?

The mobile app was so well received with the Oman region that it has since been launched in 10 other markets so far (as of March 2022) in the META region.

On an ongoing basis, data is being collected from multiple standpoints and perspectives like app usage analytics including app acquisition, activation, retention, and engagement as well as feedback from users on platforms like the app stores.

This is then analyzed and translated into a continual cycle of enhancements of the user experience to ensure we are focused on innovation and creating exciting new experiences as well as pushing the existing experience to keep improving.